22 March 2015 12:49 AM

This country is now in the grip of a permanent inquisition into the past. It can never really end, or find out the truth, because there is no objective test of it. Many of those being investigated are dead. The only effect of it is to discredit and undermine what is left of our institutions, from Parliament to the police.

Do people have any idea how much our civilisation depends on trust, or of what will happen when it is gone?

But it is even worse than that. As we boast of our supposed respect for Magna Carta and national liberty, we are trampling on them.

I suspect that many in politics and the media, like me, are worried by this. But they fear to say anything because they can feel the hot breath of the mob on their necks.

The moment you say that Geoffrey Dickens was a buffoon with a poor grasp of facts, that his ‘dossier’ on child abuse might not have amounted to very much, and was lost for that reason, some basement-dweller hunched in the sickly glow of his computer screen will start muttering ‘What’s he got to hide?’ and ‘Perhaps he was one of them’.

From such accusations there is no escape, especially in an age when bemedalled field marshals in their 90s can have their homes searched by officious gendarmes. The word ‘police’ can really no longer be applied to this bureaucratic, continental-style militia of paramilitary social workers, jangling with weapons, loaded with powers they aren’t fit to wield, and almost wholly bereft of common sense.

The quiet collapse of English liberty, and the shortage of people willing to defend it against the braying demands of ‘security’, has left us all powerless against the state. If Lord Bramall is not safe from this sort of treatment, nobody is.

I must stress here that I have no opinions at all on the guilt or innocence of anyone accused of such crimes. I am morally and legally bound to presume that they are innocent, unless and until their guilt is proved.

That presumption, far more than a near-useless vote or a ‘Human Rights’ Act, is the single most important defence we have against tyranny. Once it has gone, in practice, the state may at any time invade your home, seize your possessions, lock you up for ever and melt the key, simply because it does not like you. And it can invent reasons to do so, which a gullible media will unquestioningly accept.

Any judge of spirit, faced with the behaviour of police and prosecutors in modern Britain, really ought to throw out all such cases because it is impossible for those accused to have a fair trial.

Everyone will have seen on TV the processions of grim-jawed gendarmes in white forensic suits carting away computers, houses surrounded with cars and vans with flashing lights, the hovering helicopters, the self-righteous officers enjoying their fame as they trawl for ‘victims’ and promising such persons – as they have no right to do – that ‘You will be believed. We will support you’.

It is no part of a policeman’s job to believe either the accused or the accusers. Imagine how you would feel if the police told alleged burglars awaiting trial, and denying their guilt, that ‘you will be believed’. It is their job, and that of the courts, to assemble a case and seek to prove it before an impartial jury.

Over many years, those protections have been salami-sliced away. The innocent have never been at more risk of ruin. But at the same time, the police and the courts have almost completely failed to deter or control actual crime, much of which now goes unrecorded, unprosecuted and unpunished.

Our system is so upside-down and back-to-front that you can now be cautioned for rape, or be let out on bail after being convicted of crimes as grievous as manslaughter; yet in the late evening of your years, full of honour, having risked your life for your country and having done great service to the state, you can be publicly smeared by some jack-in-office.

The place where our demolished liberty once stood has been cleared of all traces, and rolled flat. In such conditions, we merely await the construction of the new totalitarian state in which our children will have to live.

Ready for action - on HMS Kwik Fit

Now that the Royal Navy’s bluejackets have been re-outfitted to look like garage mechanics, left, has the time come to rethink the whole thing? ‘Royal Navy’ sounds a bit archaic in the modern world. Perhaps we could rename it ‘Navignia’. And ships? They’re pretty old-fashioned too, aren’t they? Do we really need ships? If we can have aircraft carriers with no planes, surely a navy without ships makes sense as well. Kwik Fit could run it.

If the Budget was so good, why am I crying?

Reading the conventional coverage of the Budget on my London train on Thursday, I noticed I was crying actual tears of boredom, which poured involuntarily from my eyes and splashed audibly on to the newspaper.

How could people praise or take seriously this vote-grubbing twaddle of tax cuts, which will be snatched away before they fully take effect, and promises of spending cuts that cannot possibly be fulfilled? How can they do anything but laugh at the cheap bribes on offer, or the blatant political manoeuvres?

I’ll tell you what the Budget really means for most of us – a continued rush towards a low-wage, low-productivity economy of insecure, part-time jobs made tolerable only by cheap credit. And a crucial part of that will be the continued mass immigration that the Government pretends to oppose but, in fact, hopes for, as it keeps pay low.

And this, of course, will continue to worsen our appalling housing, health and transport crises. Our country was not designed for the population it now has, and these problems cannot be solved. We will simply have to accept that everything will, from now on, be worse for all except the super-rich. The biggest casualties of this are those, such as the old skilled working class and the professional middle class, who used to hope for a good life and modest comforts in return for long training and study.

Soon, there’ll be nothing much between the bloated banker’s bonus at one end and the zero-hours contract at the other. We’re becoming the world’s first third-world economy in a cold climate.

After all that fuss about schoolgirls rushing off to be jihadi brides, we are now to have exit checks, like any bog-standard despotism. And do you know what? It will be innocent grannies on their way to Spain who will be held up. Jihadi brides will still somehow slip through. Wait and see.

The redesigned pound coin is obviously small change. How about a New Pound, worth ten of the old ones, and divided for convenience into 20 shillings and 240 pennies?

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12 March 2015 11:33 AM

Am I supposed to rush to the aid of Jeremy Clarkson, cruelly suspended by the left-wing politically correct BBC after a row about steak and chips? After all, the BBC is left-wing, and it is politically correct to a fault, we are all (save vegetarians and vegans, of course) in favour of steak and chips, - and Mr Clarkson is….well, what is he, exactly?

For many people, he is the embodiment of what they think of as ‘right-wing’. He is full of machismo, he is noisily patriotic in a sort of ‘we won the war’ Dambusters way, he smokes, he is rude about foreigners and he goes on and on about cars and is (I believe ) responsible for the widespread, ineradicable belief that cyclists do not pay ‘road tax’ – a belief which encourages many drivers to treat cyclists as second-class citizens.

He was, I am told, invited to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. He is said to be a friend of David Cameron.

Well, I regard him and his opinions as a grave handicap to conservatism. I have never seen any logical reason why roads, a vast nationalised state monopoly paid for out of heavy taxation, should appeal to free market fanatics. Nor can I quite see why motor cars themselves should appeal to this sector of society. Mass-produced cars are barely profitable, the companies that make them often receive open or disguised state support. They spend most of their lives depreciating expensively at roadsides or in car parks, their costly and elaborate engines sitting idle for at least 22 hours out of every 24. It's hard to think of a better example of inefficient use of capital.

They also make us utterly dependent for our main fuel on some of the most unpleasant and fanatical regimes on the planet, who get rich and powerful thanks to our car obsession.

I suspect that these wasteful, ugly machines appeal to individualistic ‘libertarians’ because they enable them to express what they call their personalities, allowing them to be noisier, faster, more dangerous and more showy than they could be if they were not sitting in the midst of a ton of steel, glass and rubber, protected from the world by heavy locked doors, airbags, antilock-brakes, side-impact-protection and seat belts.

Actually cars and roads destroy settled societies, wreck landscapes, divide and distort cities, by subjecting non-drivers to the needs of cars and abolishing the walkable, human spaces which existed before. Once car ownership is general, it becomes obligatory.

Whatever this is, it is not conservative, any more than expressing contempt for other particular societies is conservative. If you respect your own culture, and expect to be left alone to enjoy it, then the least you can do is to show the same favour to other cultures. Patriotism doesn't consist of expressing contempt for other nations.

I know nothing about Mr Clarkson’s steak and chips incident, and I suppose we all have moments when we get angrily frustrated at the end of a long, hard day when a hoped-for pleasure is denied us. I don’t really care whether ‘Top Gear’ is transmitted or not.

But I really cannot see this as the liberal PC BBC versus the free spirit of the right, Jeremy Clarkson. If he is right wing, then I am not.

08 March 2015 1:00 AM

The crevasse between people and politicians is matched by a bottomless chasm between official figures and the truth about life in modern Britain.

Like all ruling castes in the grip of dogma, the Government responds to trouble by pretending it doesn’t exist.

There’s an economic boom that leaves most people feeling poorer, and lots of new jobs that turn out to be empty self-employment.

There’s a massacre of unborn babies that conceals the utter collapse of sexual restraint and responsibility. Even the dwindling marriage figures are artificially boosted by people faking wedlock to get citizenship.

There are schools whose victims walk away dazed after 11 years in full-time ‘education’, barely able to read or count the sheaves of alleged qualifications with which they have been issued.

Some of them are then persuaded to go deep into debt to attend grandiose ‘universities’ which will at least keep them out of the jobless figures for another three years.

And then there’s crime. The simplest way to reduce this is to decide that lots of crimes aren’t crimes any more, so the police stop trying to prevent them and they become normal.Then, you fiddle the figures – until the fiddles are exposed.

Now, a new form of deception is being employed. It is called ‘Out Of Court Disposal’, and it’s just a way of magically making crime disappear by not doing anything to the people who commit it.

In some police areas almost half of crimes are dealt with in this way. The lowest figure is 26 per cent – a minimum of a quarter of all reported crime, swept under the carpet and unpunished, throughout the country.

Generally that means the transgressor gets a ‘caution’ or some other vacuous non-penalty. More than 7,000 of the offences written off in this offhand way last year involved violence. There were 82 robberies and 20 rapes.

Even the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, a body so decayed in mind and force that it recently listened with rapt attention to the ‘evidence’ on drugs of the supposed comedian Russell Brand, recognises that 30 per cent of these outcomes are ‘inappropriate’, that is to say, utterly inadequate for the crime involved.

The truth is that, if the police and courts tried to enforce the laws of England as they stand, we would need about a million police officers, hundreds of new courts and a Gulag-sized penal colony in which to house the resulting prisoners.

The whole thing has been out of control for years. The poorer you are, the more you will know this. The closer you are to the political elite, the less you will know it. It is only when the drug-addled robbers begin hammering on the front doors of the elite that they will stop pretending this is a ‘moral panic’ and recognise that there is something wrong.

Well done in China William - now go and shake hands with Vladimir Putin

Prince William, quite rightly, has been consorting with the bloodstained tyrants of China, still up to their unapologetic armpits in gore from the Tiananmen Square massacre, and still cramming critics into an enormous unjust empire of prison camps, the Laogai.

We have to deal with these people because that is what the world is like.

Similarly, we maintain our alliance in Nato with Turkey. That wildly corrupt country’s increasingly erratic President Erdogan persecutes and imprisons his opponents, and has just moved into a megalomaniac 1,000-room palace in Ankara, costing £400 million and 30 times the size of the White House.

It contains a special laboratory in which five experts analyse President Erdogan’s meals for suspicious substances, a 21st-Century version of the food-tasters of ancient times.

In light of this, how can we get so hoity-toity about President Putin of Russia? His crimes are undoubted, but our faked-up moral outrage is as absurd as Mr Erdogan’s palace.

Alliances, royal visits and trade missions for some despots, sanctions and sermons for Mr Putin. It makes no sense.

You’re being fooled, as you were over Iraq 12 years ago. Please don’t be.

Yet another attack on your pension pot

Gordon Brown was rightly loathed for his state-sponsored raid on the pension savings of Britain’s thrifty classes.

Well, who would you like to blame for the latest version of the same thing – six years of state-imposed flat interest rates that have cost the country’s savers £130 billion?

This vast theft of cash from the careful and responsible will mean a pinched old age for many of its victims, who foolishly thought they lived under a government that supported and protected people like them.

Don't fall for Cameron's school con

Gove and Cameron have both turned their backs on having academically selective schools in every town

How strangely our attitudes change.

When Anthony Blair got his sons into an exceptional, elite state school, much of the world howled in derision.

He pretended to support comprehensive schooling, which he knew in his heart was a failure. And then he pretended he wasn’t pretending.

Now, by some strange alchemy, Tory politicians are doing the same thing, and are being praised for it.

David Cameron and Michael Gove have both turned their backs on the one reform of state schools that would put good education back in the reach of the poor – academically selective grammar schools in every town.

Yet both have sent children to a school that selects instead through the public embrace of faith.

Yet is it Christian for rich professionals to fight with sharp elbows for sought-after places in rare good state schools?

Grey Coat Hospital is a comprehensive only in the sense that Number 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terraced house.

Is it so wonderfully egalitarian, to send your child to a school whose uniform must be bought from a Chelsea department store, and where fewer than one in six pupils qualifies for free school meals

I found out a few months ago that Nick Clegg is astonishingly ignorant about the drug laws in this country.

He really believes that the police cruelly persecute drug users (if only they did).

Ignorance of this kind is wilful. The truth is readily available. He remains ignorant because he does not want to know. Why?

As evidence piles up that cannabis is a dangerous drug, those like Mr Clegg and the businessman Richard Branson should be incessantly asked what their interest is in backing the risky cause of decriminalisation. It is certainly not in the interest of the young people of this country.

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26 January 2015 1:41 PM

I was very sorry to hear that Howard Marks, the famous cannabis smuggler and advocate of cannabis decriminalisation, has inoperable cancer. I disagree with everything he argues for, and have debated against him on four occasions. But I regard him as a civilized opponent, a gentleman and a principled defender of free speech.

In fact I am often thinking of him when I experience the other thing – an opponent who lacks generosity, who misrepresents me, who confuses disagreement with personal dislike and lets one become the other, who isn’t actually paying attention to what I say, and who probably wishes in secret that I could be shut up by force.

Howard is the opposite of all these things. I’ll describe the strongest instance of his generosity in a moment. He’s never been other than friendly despite our disagreement. A few years ago, when I bested him on a point on a debate, I was struck by the way he had carefully researched that very point the next time we met. Because we each listened to the other, we both made each other think and came back with a cogent answer to it.

He is also possessed of the picturesque ruin of a once-beautiful voice. And I often wonder what he might have made of himself had he not chosen the sad path of drugs. He has a considerable mind, and the country would have benefited greatly had that mind been used for another purpose. He is of course a grammar school product, from the lost days when the sons of Merchant Navy captains from Bridgend could get into Balliol College, Oxford.

But this is how we met. Long ago, so long I can’t recall the date. I agreed to discuss the drugs issue with him at a fringe meeting of the National Union of Students conference, one winter's night in Blackpool. This took place in one of the side rooms of the vast, ornate Winter Gardens there. A lot of people had come to hear Howard. Soon after we had begun, someone in the audience (or perhaps not) spread a false story that I had said from the platform that I was a ‘racist’. The person involved later withdrew and apologised for this slur.

I had no idea that this storm was quietly growing as I spoke. Since it wasn't true, I couldn't have known the story was circulating. There was a certain amount of muttering from a part of the audience, but that’s not unusual at such meetings.

Then ( and I have to say the meeting was going rather well, with plenty of repartee, humour and audience engagement) a senior official of the National Union of Students marched up on to the platform and told me that I must immediately cease speaking and leave. When I asked why (totally amazed by this behaviour) he told me that I ought to know, and that I must know why. I said I had no idea, and protested quite loudly. The microphones were then turned off. Some sort of protest group had meanwhile assembled and were shouting. I can speak without a microphone, and proceeded to do so. The NUS official then said ‘In that case, I must ask you to leave the platform’.

At this point, Howard declared ‘Well, if he’s going, I’m going too’. What’s more, he put his arm firmly round my shoulder as we walked through the shouting protest group.

I was then asked to sit in a side-room, where, to my even greater astonishment, I was approached by a police officer who offered to escort me to the railway station for my own safety. Never having been run out of town before, and being (as an ex-Trotskyist) very unscared of Trotyskyist mini-mobs, I urged him not to worry. I would leave under my own power, and spend the night in Blackpool as planned, thanks all the same.

Very cleverly, the officer pointed out (accurately) that the Winter Gardens are full of glass. The place is terribly breakable. If I left without an escort, he said, who knows what might happen to the ornate glass panels and lamps we saw all round us. And of course, if they were damaged, he, the police officer, would be held responsible for having failed to keep the peace. Surely I didn’t want that.

So, seething in fury, but outmanoeuvred, I agreed to be escorted to a back entrance like a fugitive, though not to the station. Nothing of any kind happened to me. I didn’t see Howard again for some time, but I was deeply impressed by his instinctive revulsion at the way I was treated, and his readiness to stand literally shoulder to shoulder if it had come to trouble. Every time I've met him since has also been a pleasure, though we'll never agree. Not many people are like this, and more should be. I am very sorry he is so ill, and send him my very best wishes at this bad time.

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And so with a loud ‘clunk’, it all falls into place. Britain’s apparently mad foreign policy of the past few years now makes almost complete sense. It had seemed to me that a slavish desire to please the Saudi government lay behind our government’s desire to attack Syria. Well, I can see why we, as an increasingly indebted country with very few flourishing export industries apart from weapons and aircraft, might want to be on good terms with Riyadh, a limitlessly wealthy oil state with a large appetite for… weapons and aeroplanes. It may be an old excuse, but it’s perfectly true that if we didn’t sell them these things, someone else would.

Now, I would much rather fly a flag at half mast from time to time, or get Prince Charles to struggle into a burnous again, than despatch British service personnel into another stupid war. And I prefer British workers to be employed.

But we cannot really square this with our claims to be the apostle of liberty, democracy etc. etc. in the Arab world. So let’s not do so. Be polite to the Saudi Royal Family by all means. It wudln't be the first or the last despotism with which we have cheerfully done business.

Send any number of royal princes and politicians to Riyadh to be nice to them if it saves British jobs.

But please, please stop pretending, at the same time, to be the apostles of liberty, democracy and the rule of law, in the Arab world or anywhere else. It's tiresome, stupid, an insult to the intelligence and it only gets us into conflicts for which we are (to put it mildly) not equipped.

As I wrote nearly a year ago (23rd February 2014) ‘I was filled with admiring wonder by a picture last week of Prince Charles in full Lawrence of Arabia gear. Could his trip (one of several in recent years) have been connected to the finalising of a contract under which BAE is supplying 72 Typhoon fighter aircraft to Riyadh? I do hope so.

‘BAE is one of our few remaining real industries, because (though nobody admits this) we protect it against foreign competition, and work hard to keep it in orders. The Prince is right to help.

But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism sit very oddly with our windbaggery over ‘democracy’ in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. One or the other. But not both.’

I’m not sure now sustainable this Saudi policy is if we just carry on being ncoe to the, but don't join any more wars. But quite possibly, it is practicable.

Does it really require us to attack Saudi Arabia’s enemies in the Arab and Islamic world, as our leaders seem to think?

Personally, I suspect that Saudi Arabia doesn’t much care whether Britain tags along in American operations against Saudi Arabia’s foes. I think it’s just as happy to get the Royal visits, and forget the airstrikes and the ground troops. Likewise, I think Washington is less concerned than we are told it is, about whether a British contingent joins the US armed forces on any of these adventures. The USA does not need our help physically, and don’t think it really needs it diplomatically either. Anyway, these days France seems very happy to act as chief sidekick and is, after all, the home of the poodle.

The British government cannot openly explain what I suspect is its reasoning. It is rightly unsure that Britain is willing to pay in lives for Saudi orders. Our leaders would never dare say ‘Saudi Arabia will buy lots of things from us if we attack Syria, so that is what we are going to do’. Because most British people would object to Britain, behaving in this way. They think we’re still an independent, solvent, sovereign country which keeps armed forces to defend itself. (They were also, encouragingly, unfooled in the end by the propaganda campaign for the Syrian war, though they seem broadly fooled by the anti-Russian public relations campaign.)

If Mr Cameron or anyone else were to say such a thing, apart from anything else, the pretence that the government has solved, or is anywhere near solving, our economic problems would immediately be punctured, quite fatally.

But it’s even worse if it isn’t even true – that the Saudi and American pressure to do these things is small or non-existent, and the real problem is the self-important vanity of our politicians, who like to imagine that they are still significant figures in the world and enjoy almost any excuse to start ordering armed forces into action and watching the resulting pretty explosions (pretty if you’re not nearby) on 24-hour TV.

And so we had the ridiculous pretence that we wished to support ‘democracy’, liberty etc etc etc’ in Syria, or wherever it is, is maintained, with a straight face, by Mr Cameron and by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague. At the same time, of course, Saudi Arabia was using British made armoured vehicles to support the government of Bahrain in its efforts to prevent ‘democracy’ or liberty from breaking out there. And Britain has been silent about the violent military putsch that has put an end to ‘democracy’ in Egypt. Also, though they never mention it, some of our governing class must be having some misgivings about the disastrous outcome of our ‘democratic’ intervention in Libya, which has turned that country into a circle of Hell from which no easy escape is visible.

By the way, there’ve been some interesting revelations recently about the closeness between the Blair government and Colonel Gaddafi. But can anybody tell me what the initial policy of the Cameron government was towards Libya?

I will tell you. Archives reveal ( as I first pointed out some years ago) that the 'Minister for Africa', Henry Bellingham slurped up to the Colonel (referring to him as 'Brother Leader') at an EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli on November 30, 2010. A few weeks before, another Minister, Alastair Burt, told the Libyan British Business Council that Libya had 'turned a corner' which 'has paved the way for us to begin working together again'.

It’s so complicated. Sometimes I wonder if the British government actually wanted Parliament to reject the Syria war plan, having realised ( after learning a bit more about the Syrian ‘rebels’) that it had ignorantly talked itself into a disastrous policy but having no other way of telling the Saudis that we couldn’t now take part. The immediate collapse of the government’s efforts to get its war was remarkable . Even more remarkable was the collapse, days later, of President Obama’s desire to bomb Syria. Seymour Hersh put forward another theory in the New York Review of Books here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin and here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line, which is interesting if impossible to prove.

Of course, our leaders still pretend they wanted to fight, and blame Ed Miliband for getting in the way (I only wish he had done so more vigorously). But they would, wouldn’t they?

18 January 2015 12:07 AM

We are on the verge of founding Britain’s first Thought Police. Using the excuse of terrorism – whose main victim is considered thought – Theresa May’s Home Office is making a law which attacks free expression in this country as it has never been attacked before.

We already have some dangerous laws on the books. The Civil Contingencies Act can be used to turn Britain into a dictatorship overnight, if politicians can find an excuse to activate it.

But the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, now slipping quietly and quickly through Parliament, is in a way even worse. It tells us what opinions we should have, or should not have.

As ever, terrorism is the pretext. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that the criminal drifters, school drop-outs and drug-addled losers who do much terrorist dirty work (and whose connections with vast worldwide conspiracies are sketchy to say the least) will be even slightly affected by it.

In a consultation paper attached to the Bill, all kinds of institutions, from nursery schools (yes really, see paragraph 107) to universities, are warned that they must be on the lookout for ‘extremists’.

But universities are told they have a ‘responsibility to exclude those promoting extremist views that support or are conducive to terrorism’.

Those words ‘conducive to’ are so vague that they could include almost anybody with views outside the mainstream.

What follows might have come from the laws of the Chinese People’s Republic or Mr Putin’s Russia. Two weeks’ advance notice of meetings must be given so that speakers can be checked up on, and the meeting cancelled if necessary.

Warning must also be given of the topic, ‘sight of any presentations, footage to be broadcast, etc’. A ‘risk assessment’ must be made on whether the meeting should be cancelled altogether, compelled to include an opposing speaker or (even more creepy) ‘someone in the audience to monitor the event’.

Institutions will be obliged to promote ‘British values’. These are defined as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. ‘Vocal and active opposition’ to any of these is now officially described as ‘extremism’.

Given authority’s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice. As for ‘democracy’, plenty of people (me included) are not at all sure we have it, and wouldn’t be that keen on it if we did.

Am I then an ‘extremist’ who should be kept from speaking at colleges? Quite possibly. But the same paragraph (89, as it happens) goes further. ‘We expect institutions to encourage students to respect other people with particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010’.

These ‘protected characteristics’, about which we must be careful not to be ‘extremist’, are in fact the pillars of political correctness – including disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, sex and sexual orientation.

The Bill is terrible in many other ways. And there is no reason to believe that any of these measures would have prevented any of the terrorist murders here or abroad, or will do so in future.

They have been lifted out of the box marked ‘try this on the Home Secretary during a national panic’, by officials who long to turn our free society into a despotism.

Once, there would have been enough wise, educated, grown-up people in both Houses of Parliament to stand up against this sort of spasm. Now most legislators go weak at the knees like simpering teenage groupies whenever anyone from the ‘Security’ or ‘Intelligence’ services demands more power and more money.

So far there has been nothing but a tiny mouse-squeak of protest against this dangerous, anti-British, concrete-headed twaddle. It will go through. And in ten years’ time we’ll wonder why we’re locking people up for thinking. We’ll ask: ‘How did that happen?’ This is how it happens.

British values...it's a baffling topic these days

You'd never guess just how few homosexuals there were from the way we go on about it.

In a spot check to make sure their Christian school was teaching ‘British values’, baffled tots in Sunderland were asked by government inspectors about ‘what lesbians do’.

Almost immediately after this revelation, plans were announced in Manchester for an entire school devoted to homosexual, bisexual and transgender children.

I’m not actually against such a school, if enough people want it. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as far as I’m concerned.

Let’s have atheist schools, too, and see how they work out.

But if we can select pupils on the grounds of their sexual orientation, why is it illegal to select on the grounds of ability? Something wrong here, surely?

As for the lesbian question, I was 12 before I even knew what a call-girl was, let alone a lesbian, and look how I turned out – not to mention my grasp of ‘British values’.

Finally a film that's got it right

For once, a film about real events that comes close to getting it right. The Theory Of Everything, a fictionalised but broadly true account of the marriage of Professor Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane, is intelligent and profound, irresistibly moving andsurprisingly funny in places.

The recent past is subtly recreated. The plot pivots on the extraordinary fact that Mrs Hawking – an academic in her own right – maintained a Christian belief despite her husband’s active atheism.

Their marriage, her selfless love despite his illness, the marriage’s eventual breakdown, thedreadful contrast between Hawking’s soaring mind and his collapsing, failing body, mustconstantly have challenged the deepest beliefs of both of them.

Eddie Redmayne is, of course, superb as he inhabits the professor’s life and becomes him.But Felicity Jones is even better, and, rather surprisingly, manages to portray Jane as an even more remarkable human being than her husband.

Lethal cost of the great crime lie

Somehow the Government has so far kept the lid on the fact that despite fiddled figures claiming that crime is dropping, our prisons are full, and exploding with violence, gang rivalry and drugs.

Prison officers, the main civilising influence in these dreadful liberal institutions, are in growing danger of severe violence.

Ten are attacked every day. On Radio 4’s File On 4 on Tuesday, Peter McParlin, the chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said: ‘I wake up every morning thinking, “Today is the day one of my colleagues will be murdered in their work.” ’

This crisis is the result of 50 years of Left-wing failure, which has ensured that wrongdoers don’t encounter serious punishment until they are already hardened criminals.

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17 January 2015 5:28 PM

I thought I would try to tot up what we know about the Paris murderers. We know what they did. We presume we know why they did it. But are we right to treat Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly as a co-ordinated unit? And if not, what did motivate them?

I would stress that I do not claim to know. What follows is simply interested speculation, informed by my own known views on this subject. I offer it for discussion and examination, not as a solution. Our knowledge is imperfect, and may always remain so, since the main actors in this horror are dead.

Their own various claims seem to me to mean little. Why should such people be assumed to be telling the truth about themselves, in the middle of a crime? Claims of membership made either by them or by various organisations are uncheckable and could easily be empty boasting.

And are we right to treat them as highly-organised and trained jihadis? And what about Hayat Boumedienne, wife of Coulibaly, niqab-clad crossbow-wielder etc? She is now reported to have been in Turkey, presumed to be on her way to Syria, before the outrage took place. Reuters have reported :’The suspected female accomplice of Islamist militants behind attacks in Paris was in Turkey five days before the killings and crossed into Syria on January 8th, [Turkish]Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was cited on Monday by the state-run Anatolian News Agency as saying.’

Those dates would put Boumedienne in Turkey before the violence in Paris began, leaving for Syria while the attackers were still on the loose.

In the first days of any event such as this, reporters struggle to get hard information, rumours and unconfirmed reports rush through the air. It is very difficult to get reliable facts. I understand this. The first proper acccounts of the Septeebr 11th 2001 massacre did not emerge for a long time after the event. Much is still secret or 'redacted, nearly 14 years later.

But there’s also, it seems to me, a bit of a desire to find a pattern, one which makes the events fit the idea (common in governments, security services and newsrooms) that we face a co-ordinated Islamist conspiracy against our ‘way of life’, wich can be countered by increased surveillance, restrictions on liberty, and greater so-called 'security'.

The alternative, that most European capitals now contain an underclass of chaotic mentally unstable drifters, drug abusers and petty criminals, sometimes employed in dead-end jobs such as pizza delivery, sometimes not, whose empty lives can, alas, be given meaning by Islamic utopianism, is less explored. It’s less exciting. It gives much less support to lobbies for ‘tough’ laws, ‘crackdowns’ and surveillance. I think it should be considered. Careful, attentive policing of these parts of society might yield more than any amount of crackdowns and surveillance on the rest of us.

This, by the way is *not* precisely the same argument which I apply to the ‘lone wolf’ attacks of Woolwich, Sydney and Ottawa.

The Paris murderers can more properly be referred to as ‘terrorists’, though Coulibaly less so than the others, because his initial crime – the random shooting of a jogger at Fontenay-aux-Roses - was so utterly wanton. His later murders of hostages were likewise acts of utter stupid cruelty, not even explicable by the fanatics’ own perverted code. (Note to would-be twisters and misrepresentation merchants: I am not, by saying this, excusing or condoning more politically purposeful murders. I am simply making a distinction between different types of despicable, indefensible crime, because I think that distinction may one day help us prevent similar outrages).

When Coulibaly murdered a policewoman at Montrouge, which might in his twisted mind have had a political or religious purpose, he also shot a roadsweeper in the face, leaving him critically injured (I have been unable to learn more details of his fate) . That action (like the shooting of the jogger, linked to Coulibaly by bullet casings found at the scene (though the victim says his assailant wasn’t Coulibaly) is inexplicable by any political or religious creed, and cannot have been connected to or ‘synchronised with’ the Charlie Hebdo massacre, nor done in response to alleged ‘orders’ by any supposed terrorist High Command.

It is just random, moronic, inexcusable,cruel violence. Given the unending possibility of my being misrepresented by my critics, I must point out once more, quite explicitly, that my selection of these crimes for special mention is not aimed at in any way excusing or lessening the condemnation of the more obviously political crimes against journalists or Jews.

I mention them because , like the Kouachis’ initial attempt to enter the wrong building in their attack on Charlie Hebdo, and their shooting of a maintenance worker when they first entered the building, and their failure (for which we must be grateful) to kill all those they found in the editorial office, they suggest that we are dealing with not-especially-competent or well-trained killers, who have not properly planned their crime or prepared their escape.

We must also be pleased that one of the brothers was so incompetent at terrorist crime that he actually left his identity card in the car they abandoned. What sort of terrorist ‘training’ would leave someone able to do this, I am not sure. It cannot be very thorough. I do not know how much longer the French authorities would have taken to track them down without this clue. One expects that fingerprints, or CCTV images, or purchase records will eventually allow police to track culprits down. But an actual identity card in the getaway car! This discovery may have saved days.

It is quite clear from the reports that both Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly had been in contact with Islamist preachers of various kinds, and one or both Kouachis travelled at least once to the Yemen though there is less information about what exactly they got up to there.

I do get a bit exasperated with all this talk of terrorist ‘training camps’. Once you’ve mastered the use of a gun (and a distressing number of modern petty criminals have done this quite easily), no particular ‘training’ is required to murder defenceless journalists, or indeed to kill unprepared police officers taken by surprise. Training would be required to confront professional soldiers. But almost any fool can kill a defenceless human being, especially if he has the advantage of surprise, which terrorists almost always do.

You have to be in some kind of abnormal circumstance, eitehr externally imposed or internally driven, to kill a stranger in cold blood. This isn’t at all to excuse such acts. People still know such killings are evil, and that they shouldn’t do them. The question is, how they persuade themselves that, in this particular case, it’s justified. If they’re drug abusers (again, no excuse, this is a voluntary act with known consequences) , their senses may be so dulled and their minds so clouded with hallucinations, persecution mania and phantom voices that they do not fully grasp the horror of what they are doing.

Evidence now suggests that this was the case with Michael Adebowale, one of the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby . I have noted before that we know for certain that Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor. A psychiatrist found him 'paranoid and incoherent', and said his symptoms were worsened by 'heavy use of cannabis'.

This may have been the case with other terrorist killers in recent incidents, and also with some non-terrorist killers whose crimes, though non-political, were similarly horrific. But a general lack of interest in this aspect, in the police and the media, means that we do not have enough information to say. Hence, in my view, the need for more curiosity about this problem. (Note for Ben Goldacre: by ‘curiosity’ I mean that police and media should routinely inquire into the drug habits of suspects and culprits in cases of violence, terrorist and non-terrorist. And no more).

Fanaticism can certainly do this, especially one which allows the killer to think that his victims are not fully human, But some other source of unreason is more than likely. The combination of fanaticism and drug abuse is plainly particularly dangerous. But, given the layers of society, in Britain and France, from which terrorist killers are drawn, fanaticism will in many cases be allied with drug abuse.

I have found no reports of previous blatantly irrational or unhinged behaviour by any of the killers, though some of Coulibaly’s criminal record and his actions during his final murders seem to me to suggest a person not wholly in charge of his own actions. Again, note that this is not an excuse. His previous life, a very wicked one, had led him to this point and he had chosen that course.

Of Cherif Kouachi we know that he was arrested in 2005 on the way to Iraq via Syria. His lawyer insists that he did not actually want to go and was glad to be caught. In prison (where, on the Continental system, he spent more time in pre-trial detention than he did serving his sentence) he met Coulibaly, though no doubt he also met plenty of other people and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the meeting was particularly significant.

The ‘radical preacher’ under whose influence he allegedly fell, Farid Benyettou, discouraged him from attacks on Jews saying that France was ‘not a land of jihad’.

Court records show Cherif Kouachi said he didn't consider himself a good enough Muslim, and said he had only been to the mosque two or three times before he met Benyettou, and he had been smoking cannabis.

Said Kouachi, Cherif’s elder brother, was in Yemen in 2009, and there shared a flat with Abdulmutallab, attempted bomber of Northwest Flight 253, ‘for one or two weeks’. It is hard to tell whether this is significant. ‘Intelligence officials’ quoted in various stories say he went to Yemen again in 2011 for terror training. The source is an unnamed US official quoting an unnamed French intelligence source. But the French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told Christiane Amanpour in an on-the-record TV interview that one brother travelled to Yemen in 2005. Oddly, she would not say which one.

Here are one or two interesting notes about the culprits.

‘Orphaned at a young age, they [The Kouachi brothers] drifted into a life of smoking drugs, petty offending and rap music ‘ , Cherif had a ‘minor criminal record’

Said Kouachi was ‘ …the only one of the three who had not been in prison in France. But he had been questioned by police and released over the Buttes-Chaumont jihadi cell in 2005. Yemeni security officials confirmed that he had spent several months in the country, was suspected of having fought for al-Qaida and was probably among a group of foreigners deported from Yemen in 2012. Both brothers were on US and UK no-fly lists.

On Amedy Coulibaly:

He had a criminal record “The first case was the armed robbery of a sports clothing shop. It stood out because his getaway car was in an accident and rolled off a bridge, but Coulibaly nonetheless got out of the car, badly bruised, and went straight back to school where he just sat down and got on with his class.” This does not suggest a particularly organised or co-ordinated individual.

A lawyer, Damien Brossier later defended him for an armed bank robbery. “There was a mad-dog element about him,” he said. “He was friendly, he was not unpleasant, he wasn’t hard to talk to, there wasn’t a tension. One created a superficial relationship with him.”

Coulibaly served another prison term for a drugs offence before training to be a television fitter, settling in Grigny, back in the south of Paris. (Times 10/01). He has a record of small drugs and theft offences. One of 10 children and the only boy, Coulibaly became a delinquent at 17 and a repeat offender for petty thefts and drugs crimes

Coulibaly said at 3pm (to a radio station) that he had already killed four people in his attack on the supermarket - suggesting that the final assault by police was relatively successful. He also said that he had worked "in synchronisation” with the Charlie Hebdo killers. He claimed to be working for Isis. Kouachi said that he was "sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen".

11 January 2015 12:23 AM

Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief. Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else.

We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre.

Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs.

Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation.

The Prime Minister, whose government was busy exploiting the tragedy to shore up the (already vast) snooping powers of the State, said it was not the day to make political arguments.

Why ever not? What could be more political than discussing how to defend ourselves against this sort of crime? If it is not political, then why is he talking about it at all, instead of leaving the matter to the Archbishop of Canterbury?

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, a hungry headline-seeker and reliable sucker for any scheme to diminish freedom that her civil servants drop on her desk, said Mr Farage was ‘irresponsible’.

Why? Was he any less irresponsible than the chief of that sinister organisation MI5, who seized his chance to make our flesh creep with scare stories, and simultaneously apologise in advance for not actually being able to protect us?

Dame Tessa Jowell squeaked that the Ukip leader’s remarks were ‘sickening’. Why? Ed Miliband, whose very job as Leader of the Opposition depends on the belief that disagreement is a good thing in a free country, moaned that Mr Farage was ‘seeking to divide us’.

The Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg said Mr Farage was ‘making political points’ on the ‘back of bloody murders’.

Well, who wasn’t? A sanctimonious unanimity descended on politics and the media. ‘Je suis Charlie,’ everyone said. It was an issue of liberty, we all said. They can’t silence us, stop us drawing cartoons, etc etc etc.

Great mountains of adjectives piled up on every corner, much like those hills of flowers and teddy bears we like to place at the scenes of tragedies.

You can feel the presence of the snarling conformist mob, waiting for some dissenter on whom they can fall, kicking and biting. So-called social media, in fact an intolerant and largely brainless electronic mob, has made this much worse since the sad death of the Princess.

We should stand up to them. It is especially strange that this conformism claims to speak in the name of freedom, when in fact it doesn’t much like freedom at all.

I suggest that we actually think about this. Of course, we all deplore the murder and grieve for the dead and the bereaved. I don’t need David Cameron or Tessa Jowell to tell me that, thanks.

But for the rest, there’s quite a lot of posing going on. Very few newspapers, magazines or TV stations have published or ever will publish the cartoons of Mohammed that Charlie Hebdo printed.

Let us be frank. One major reason for this is fear. We know that Muslims take this very seriously, and that some of them take it very seriously indeed.

Let us agree it was brave to publish these images. That’s easy for me. I know I wouldn’t do it, and I readily acknowledge that I am a coward.

But it also required compulsory bravery on the part of others, especially the police officers, some of them Muslim, laudably and selflessly guarding people they may not have liked or approved of. Not to mention all the others caught in the crossfire.

And what was the purpose of this bravery? What cause, anywhere in the world, was advanced by it? Surely the point of bravery is that it is self-sacrificial for a purpose, to save others? Who was saved by this?

As for freedom, here’s an interesting thing. The French Leftist newspaper Liberation reported on September 12, 1996, that three stalwarts of Charlie Hebdo (including Stephane ‘Charb’ Charbonnier) had campaigned in their magazine to collect more than 170,000 signatures for a petition calling for a ban on the French National Front party. They did this in the name of the ‘Rights of Man’.

You, like me, may dislike the National Front greatly. But lovers of liberty simply do not seek to ban parties they do not like.

This is a double paradox. The French National Front exists mainly because a perfectly reasonable concern about mass immigration was sneeringly dismissed by the mainstream French parties. Something similar is happening in Germany, where large demonstrations against ‘the Islamisation of the West’ in many cities have been scornfully attacked by that country’s elite.

If reasonable calls for restrictions on immigration had been heeded when they were first made, right across Europe, would we now be in the mess we are in? If it is officially regarded as irresponsible, or ‘exploitation’, or ‘sickening’, or ‘divisive’ to say this, then we do not live in freedom, and those who claim to speak in its name are not telling the truth.

********

If Frau Angela Merkel’s Germany does not dominate Europe, then why does everyone else in the EU toady to her and beg her for favours? The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means. Stop pretending otherwise.

*****

A fond farewell to an old friend and colleague of mine, the great industrial reporter Barrie Devney, who died recently.

In the days when the whole country was convulsed by strikes, he was liked and trusted by both sides in many bitter disputes.

Barrie’s father was a bus conductor and his mother ran a sweetshop, but he ended up on first-name terms with Cabinet Ministers. I think that’s at least partly because he grew up in the age of grammar schools, that great open door which our politicians shut and sealed.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION TO 'SECRET JUSTICE'

Secret justice isn’t justice. Whether in the family courts or in the criminal courts, it is time it came to an end.

The law that allows a person to allege rape in secret, and remain unknown for ever, is particularly intolerable. The case of Mark Pritchard MP is just the latest ordeal faced by an innocent man whose accuser has lifelong anonymity.

Those who seek this protection should be asked to apply the same rule to themselves. They should be told that, if their accusation is dismissed by a jury, they will then face automatic prosecution for perjury, in which they will be named if convicted, while the alleged rapist will not.

If they are happy with this arrangement, then they should keep their anonymity. If not, not. Perjury, in its way, is as foul a crime as rape.

The simpler solution is to stick to the laws of natural justice, and have everything in the open.

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30 November 2014 1:10 AM

For years there was a site on Facebook called ‘Peter Hitchens Must Die’. I thought it was funny, and I miss it now it has gone. Hardly a week goes by on Twitter without some Left-wing oaf going online and wishing I was dead. Sometimes I write back and ask if their mothers know they are doing this, but I haven’t hired a bodyguard yet.

In short, the internet is crawling with stupid people saying moronic things they do not really mean, like the man who said he was going to blow up an airport because it was closed by snow.

Dealing with this is a simple matter of proportion. The ludicrously over-rated Home Secretary, Mrs Theresa May, obviously has no such sense. She claims to think that the terror threat to this country is now ‘greater than it has been at any time before or after 9/11’, a comically wrong belief.

Actually, the greatest terror threat this country ever faced came from the IRA, as some of us remember well. But we got rid of that threat by surrendering to them, which is perhaps why everyone now forgets it.

If this country is now a target for terror, it is largely because the terrorists know that we will eventually give in to their demands, just as we gave in to the IRA.

There ought to be a museum in which politicians’ bombastic statements after terror outrages, vowing revenge and justice, are displayed beside the eventual shabby outcomes of terrorist pressure.

Yet these same two-faced cowards are constantly trying to pretend that they are our noble protectors against a shadowy foe. They do this especially when they are trying to steal our liberties.

Now, because the drug-crazed killer Michael Adebowale made an unhinged threat on Facebook, we are asked to support the secret-police surveillance of the internet.

On the same logic, we might as well allow MI5 to open all our letters, listen to all our telephone calls and bug our bedrooms, and for this creepy snooping to be allowed in evidence in court.

I don’t see how this differs from the powers given to the East German Stasi.

Not merely is this response crass and wrong, it is based on a total, wilful misunderstanding of the murder of Lee Rigby. We are looking in entirely the wrong direction, and so not seeing the blazing, illuminated signs which show what is actually going on.

Adebowale was obviously crazy when he committed his crime. An eyewitness, Cheralee Armstrong, told police he ‘looked mad, like he’d escaped from a mental hospital’.

During the trial of Adebowale, and of his accomplice Michael Adebolajo, newspapers received a very unusual warning from the judge that they must not report ‘the demeanour of the defendants’ on the video link from prison. What was it about their behaviour that prompted this strange instruction?

It wouldn’t be odd if they had behaved weirdly. Both killers were habitual users of cannabis, a drug increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, especially in young users. It was after Adebolajo began smoking the drug in his teens that his character wholly changed. Many sad parents of ruined teenagers will know about this process.

Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor.

A psychiatrist found him ‘paranoid and incoherent’, and said his symptoms were worsened by ‘heavy use of cannabis’.

Most people don’t even know this, as it doesn’t fit the ‘Al Qaeda plot’ storyline and has barely been reported.

Yet how can these gibbering, chaotic husks have been part of a disciplined, intricate terror organisation?

It’s very strange. Our Establishment sees proper enforcement of the laws against the dangerous drug cannabis as an infringement of liberty. But it is ready to place us under totalitarian surveillance, never before seen in our history, in pursuit of terrorists it will probably give in to later.

Despite the invariable claims of the adults involved that everyone’s fine, there just isn’t any serious doubt that divorce damages children.

Last week’s report from the family lawyers’ group Resolution confirmed it. So why isn’t it harder for couples with children to get divorced than it is for the childless?

Dozy Fred holds the secret to improving our private schools

The British Left is working up a new wave of spite against private schools. Following a wrong-headed speech on the subject by the fashionable historian David Kynaston, Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt has joined in.

He threatens them with tax penalties if they don’t do more to help nearby state schools. Actually, such a measure will only make private schools more inaccessible. Their fees are now so high that soon only Russian oligarchs will be able to afford them.

It’s difficult anyway to see quite what form this help will take. But here’s a suggestion.

Mr Hunt claims to be a historian. In that case he should know that there was once a superb system called the Direct Grant. Under this scheme, many of the very best private schools in the country opened up their classrooms to boys and girls from poor homes, selected on merit.

What happened to it? Why, it was shut down in 1975 in an act of egalitarian spite by Fred Mulley, then Labour Education Secretary, later notorious for falling asleep while sitting next to Her Majesty during a very noisy air display. Labour had then – as it has now – a special loathing for selection on merit.

While Mr Mulley is fated to be recalled mainly for his ill-mannered nap, his decision to slam the educational door in the faces of the poor was a far greater offence. If Labour really loved the people, as it claims to do, then Mr Hunt would want to reverse this crime, rather than win cheap applause from dim MPs for sniping at private schools. I suspect he’s just afraid they’ll notice he went to one himself.

Unvarnished truth from Moscow

If only Anna Chapman, the glamorous Russian ex-spy, were the Kremlin’s Foreign Minister instead of the much less attractive Sergei Lavrov, people might pay more attention to what Moscow says.

Even so, Mr Lavrov’s speech last week, in which he warned that sanctions directed against the Russian people are blatant, unprecedented bullying and won’t work, is worth searching out. Those who read it might learn quite a lot they didn’t know they didn’t know.

My local newspaper heralds the approach of Christmas by welcoming the opening of a mobile A&E unit to ‘treat drunk and injured people’.

It will be a ‘safe haven for those who have been found in the street too intoxicated to stand or speak and who cannot find their way home’. Actually, there are plenty of these when it’s not Christmas, but it’s nice to see that the season of goodwill hasn’t entirely been drowned out by commercialism.

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